Border-Crossing: Citizenship, Race, and Gender Symposium

MIT, October 12-13, 2012Free and open to the public.

Issues of border-crossing and citizenship, which intersect in complex ways with gender, sexuality, family, race, and religion, have taken on pressing importance in our contemporary world, affecting people around the globe, though often in very different ways based on local context. This symposium brings together scholars working in diverse disciplines, as well as experts from outside the academy (including immigration lawyers, activists, and artists) in order to examine these issues from multiple and complementary perspectives. Of particular interest to the conference planning committee was how these issues play out differently in various national contexts, including, for example, the US, France, China, Japan, India and Turkey. We also sought to understand these issues in historical perspective, in order to examine how concepts of citizenship, identity, and gender have evolved over time, and to gain clarity on the contemporary manifestations of these issues.